I'm not new to overclocking but I read a review about the mother board I just bought (Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3) and they were able to overclock it to 3.6ghz. I'm not to good with getting a system stable past about 3ghz. I have :

Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3
AMD Phenom X4 9850
Gskill DDR2 1066
9600 gt

I am using liquid cooling so it shouldn't be to hard.

Now at the moment I am on an Asus M3A, which is a total POS and maybe the reason for not being able to get much higher than 3ghz. My confusion comes with memory timings and voltage.

good luck with the GA-MA770-UD3, + Gskill DDR2 1066 this board is picky on ram, I try to install the same Gskill on a GA-MA770-UD3 customer board, last week ( fresh in my memory ) . I have to adjust the voltage of the memory, even do i was not satisfy, i put plain kingston one , since the guy do not OC

I know some people try to set their vcore manually to achieve lower temps. To me that is a bit stupid, is there any problem on just keeping it on auto and setting the multipliers up? Or do I need to do something else as well.

Its stupid because, think if your working out to gain muscle do you eat alot of protein or do you eat bare minimum.

If you're working out, do you eat the amount of food that you need, or do you just stuff your face without any inhibition? Not all CPUs require the same amount of voltage. Some can make do with less at the same frequencies, and there's no reason not to reduce the voltage if you can do it without compromising stability.